Fourcast! 15: The Sinister Six
September 7th, 2009 by david brothers | Tags: bane, Batman, black cat, catwoman, doctor octopus, green goblin, hawkman, norman osborn, podcasts, riddler, spider-man6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental brings us in as we discuss our three favorite Batman and Spider-Man villains, and just what makes them so great. Esther’s got Bane, Catwoman, and the Riddler, I’ve got Norman Osborn, Black Cat, and Doc Ock. There’s a surprised amount of similarities in our picks, even though we surprised each other.
After that is the Continuity Off to end all Continuity Offs, as Esther explains Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Hawkwoman, and Hawkworld, and I… well, give it a listen.
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He’s kinda like an Alfred ______ villain?
never mind, I got it.
but whaddaya mean Riddler’s Joker done right? Isn’t Heath Ledger and about half of Mark Hammill’s Joker stories, Joker done right?
Esther,
You are a champion.
That is all.
-Will
@Will Emmons: I consider it a challenge before the whole human race, and I never lose.
Ah, I am going to be singing that song all day.
I was really looking forward to having the Hawk-continuity cleared up for me, but I’m more lost than ever.
Are manga allowed in the continuity-off? If so, that might give David a fighting chance.
@W4: Most manga I dig don’t get that painfully complicated. Benefit of not being a part of the American Mainstream Comics Murder Machine, I guess.
@Lurkee Mcgee: All right, McGee, I’ll lay it out for you. There are three major Hawk Origins:
1. Ancient Egyptians who keep getting re-incarnated.
2. Alien cops who fight crime on earth.
3. Alien cops who rebelled against their own fascist planet and came to earth.
Problem is, they were set up so that all of these origins were churning along at the same time. So sometimes one is an alien who comes to earth as a spy and finds the other one, who is re-incarnated from a past alien lover. Sometimes they’re aliens in this life who remember being human on earth in another. Sometimes one is an alien and the other is the child of the re-incarnating Egyptians.
Basically, they re-started and retconned so much, taking a different bit of each origin each time, until it was impossible to follow.
Oh. As far as I can tell this Hawkman is an alien who believes in reincarnation, and this Hawkwoman is a niece of one of the past Hawkwomen, who briefly housed the soul of her aunt and therefore acquired her powers.
Luckily, all of the Hawks are dead now, and will hopefully stay dead forever, because no one likes them.
Kyle Baker’s Hawkman can stay, though.
@david brothers: Though I haven’t read it myself, one manga in particular has me terrified plot-wise.
On the way back from Otakon 2000, I sat with the officers of the UCSD anime club. One of the more excitable members told me about one of her favorite series, “Ayashi no Ceres.” She showed me a relationship chart that had more lines than a geometry book.
It gets better… or worse. She said, and I quote, “Those are all sex lines.”
Flabbergasted, I replied, “…they’re WHAT?”
“They’re all sex lines,” she repeated. “They’ve all had sex with each other.”
…if that anime-loving co-ed was even *half* right, then “Ayashi no Ceres” just might keep the continuity-off going. Sure, it’s no “Clone Saga,” but it should have the listeners as flabbergasted as I was.
First off, hermanos has it way wrong. The best Spider-Man villains are as follows:
1) Eddie Brock.
2) Mac Gargan.
3) Symby the Black Costume.
Second, the Hawk talk has caused this to be stuck in my head.
Hawks as i understood it:
1. Golden age archeologists who find out they’re reincarnated from ancient Eqgytians. Worked with the JSA.
2. Silver age Thanagarian space cops. Worked with the JLA in various pre-crisis and early post-crisis stories.
3. Hawkworld rebel space-cops. When DC decided they came to earth for the first time post-Crisis, the GA Hawks were retconned into the JLA for most of the SA Hawks appearances.
4. Fel Andar (Thanagarian Spy posing as Carter Hall Jr) and Sharon Parker stood in as the Hawks for the time the JSA spent in Limbo. This includes mid-to-late 80s stuff like Invasion and JLI. He is discovered and escapes back to Thanagar where he shows up during the whole Rann-Thanagar mess.
5. During Zero Hour, the Hawkworld Hawkman and the GA Hawks are bonded with some sort of extra-dimensional Hawk-God thingee and various other Hawkman incarnations into a new super Hawkman. This Hawkman eventually goes nuts and is banished to Limbo.
6. New Hawkgirl appears. Eventually revealed to be GA Hawkgirl’s great niece, and then revealed to actually have the soul of her Great Aunt in her after she committed suicide.
7. The JSA goes to Thanagar at some point and with the prompting of some religious looneys, the new Hawkgirl pulls Hawkman out of some sort of limbo portal. Geoff Johns really just sidestepped the continuity issues at this point to say “he’s back”. He answers to and acts most like the GA Hawkman, but has memories of a lot of his prior incarnations and the Thanagarian Hawkman as well.
8. Later implied in some post-IC stuff that the new Hawkman may actually be the Thanagarian who just thought he was GA Hawkman.
9. They both get enstabbenated by Zombie Ralph and Sue. They’ll probably be back again.
david: You should pick up the second-to-last Spidey issue (#603), and maybe #600, which was a damn good Ock story. The only reason I mention the more recent one is that if you hate Peter and think he’s selfish, well… the entire plot of the issue is that the Chameleon has taken over Peter’s identity, trying to use his credentials to get a bomb into a city hub under the guise of photographing the thing.
We follow him over a day, where, like any of his victims, he tells us, he makes sure they have one last day in the spotlight to be remembered by before vanishing (he kills them before taking on the ID). By the end of it, he’s cursing Peter’s name and calling him a selfish man-child after seeing all the opportunities he lets slip away.